


Until the Latter Fire Shall Heat the Deep

by gogollescent, Quixotic



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Shipping, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-11
Updated: 2011-08-11
Packaged: 2017-10-22 12:14:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/237896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quixotic/pseuds/Quixotic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a doomed timeline, Rose wakes up for the first time. With Dave's help, of course.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Until the Latter Fire Shall Heat the Deep

t1ck

TG: hey

TG: where did you go

TT: Out.

TG: no shit

TG: out where

TT: To play the rain.

TG: ...

TT: I'm tired of dicking around with turtle theology.

TT: The sooner I can talk to your overgrown calamari myself, the better.

TG: ok first off theyre not my overgrown calamari second what the hell were you even going to tell me about this

TT: I didn't want to interrupt your nap.

TT: You looked so peaceful.

TT: Sweet, like a heroic babe of myth on a honeybear's teat.

TG: stay where you are

TT: Are you going to try and stop me?

TG: no asshole im going to try and give you a hand

TT: Uh huh.

TT: Contrary to popular opinion, violin isn't actually a team sport.

TG: please like you can fool me

TG: that thing isnt a violin its a goddamn ukulele

TT: Wizardbeard does not tropical properties confer, Strider, despite your grand and overweening illusions on the subject.

TT: This is not to say that you should stop referring to the Zazzerpolo as your 'Hawaiian shirt', of course.

TG: yeah well not like hawaiis around to sue me for libel

TT: Point.

TT: Don't come after me. You'll only distract me from the task at hand.

TG: fuck you

TT: You make a compelling argument. No.

TG: jesus cant we just

TG: play parcheesi or something instead of going to badtouch the weather nymphs

TG: i liked the parcheesi

TG: ironically i mean but it was nice

TT: Do you want to save them or not.

 

t0ck

 

TT: Go back to sleep, Dave.

TG: no

TT: Yes.

TG: nope

TT: Yeah.

TG: not gonna

TT: Are too.

TG: fucking shant

TT: Most assuredly damn well shall.

TG: uh huh

TG: im on my way over now

TT: Oh, for god's sake.

TG: i can see your footsteps you know sand is really shit for stealth

TG: you probably didnt know that did you too busy sawing at your ukulele to pay attention to your pointy toes

TT: Last chance.

TG: ooh wow im shaking in my sneakers

TG: seriously though sand is great

TG: if aragorn were here hed be shedding fat ranger tears as he slowly realized his job was about to be outsourced to teenagers who you know

TG: deliberately fog their vision with ironic eyewear

TG: his only life skills no longer of any value in the tracking crazy bitches market

TG: his future all uncertain and shadowed by the promise of destitution and hot pockets

TG: sand is the motherfucking best

TG: i can see all the way to where you

TT: To where I?

TG: doubled around

TG: fuck

 

 

t1ck

 

It happens incredibly quickly.

 

You turn, and grit shifts under your heels.

 

Rose's hands move. They are not empty.

 

t0ck

 

TT: Hello, Dave.

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG]'s computer has been knocked off his unbearably beautiful face! --

 

> 8R8K

 

H34DS?

 

The sand, catsoft and treacherous, breaks your fall.

 

t1ck

 

"Your room is a fucking pigsty," you tell her, some time later. "Pigs take one look at this place and start mentally rearranging the furniture."

 

She breathes. Her hair moves where it's fallen across her mouth, pale as the dazzle of light on a blade.

 

You woke up here, after she hit you: sitting cross-legged, with your back to her door, your sunglasses heavy on your dreamed face. It's the same place you've been waking up for days. You haven't mentioned the whole moving-into-her-room thing to her. You think it would probably make her smile, which. You don't know. You've been saving the stalker's gambit revelation for a rainy day, you guess.

 

Today, you guess.

 

You wish you at least knew how it was going. Your only clues are the still, pathetic clutter, and the rise and fall of her shoulder, under the sheets, and the clear memory of her voice.

 

You are pretty sure that even the most eager, fresh-faced and deer-stalked of boy detectives would be stumped by this consummate douchebaggery.

 

"Maybe a chalk outline would help," you suggest to the sky outside the window.

 

The sky squirms. It's true: a chalk outline totally wouldn't help. And you are not the one who's supposed to need note-taking utensils on hand, anyway.

 

t0ck

 

You wait.

 

Your legs ache like maybe your knees are going into labor.

 

t1ck

 

You really miss your music. In Rose's room there is no space for anything but broodpregnant silence, even if, sometimes (like now) the silence sings. That's just the gods, though. No big deal. No deal at all. Like your own personal entourage of huge, hellish, aquatic crickets, their legs sliding edge to edge.

 

It isn't the kind of thing a guy can jam to.

 

t0ck

 

It's been an hour. Or maybe it hasn't, but who would know better than you, right?

 

You get up, and cross the scarf-strewn floor to stand beside her bed. It is a good thing you are the smoothest kid remaining in paradox space or this might even be a little creepy. A really good thing. The best thing.

 

She sleeps on her side, mostly, which is a fact you don't actually remember learning.

 

t1ck

 

Now, though, she rolls onto her back. The spread of her hair against her pillow gleams like a shattered thing.

 

You watch her hand drag, very slowly, along the sweep of her ribs, purple silk darkening under her fingers. After a moment, you reach out to touch. Because: how could her hand be wet, here, having spent a life asleep?

 

But it isn't water that gathers along the curve of her fingertip when you lift her index finger, tilting her palm toward the light. It might be ink, only it drifts, upward, diffusing through the air in little peaks and plaits.

 

"What the fuck," you observe.

 

Her finger tenses against yours, and it's then you realize that her whole forearm is shivering, edges blackly ablur. Blackly? Yeah, there's not-ink there, too, seeping through the boundary of her skin in discrete coils, like sharpie on the arm of a sad sack of a dude serving life who just isn't man enough for a prison tattoo.

 

"Man, imagine how awesome it would be if we were both awake, and I could actually talk to you about this shit," you say. "Because, I mean, I'm a pretty open-minded guy, but there must be a passage in Leviticus about this. And if not, I'm ready to add one. Get all 'thou shalt not get skin conditions that will put every mascara production center out of business in six months' up in there."

 

As an afterthought, you lift your hand away with exaggerated care.

 

To your everlasting horror, the shitty gothic residue comes with, stretching long and filmy from the first joint of her finger. It wraps around your thumb in a sleek, contained tail, liquid but never loosening its hold.

 

t0ck

 

Your everlasting horror lasts exactly as long as it takes to begin mapping the green veins that show through the thin skin of your wrist, because that's when Rose makes this fucking noise, a noise like her vocal cords are a million years older than the rest of her, like they've turned to stinking fragile dust inside her voicebox.

 

She tilts her head back, her chin thrusting forward all impudent; the scrawny column of her throat exposed.

 

t1ck

 

Her actual, nonhorrendous mascara has begun to run. That, or she's got festertongues lapping at the insides of her eyes.

 

Wow, why did you even think all of those words in a row.

 

"Okay," you whisper, "okay, please, wake me up, come on, you can hear me, right, so just wake me up."

 

You bend over her, planting your free hand on the mattress. The cool slide of the dark inside your elbow barely registers, now.

 

You do, however, notice when she takes her hand off her stomach and holds it curled a foot from her chest, like she's lifting an invisible weight, and your own arm straightens with a snap.

 

Yeah.

 

You're caught. By now, a dozen filaments connect you; your sleeve has hiked up to bunch around your bicep, pushed along by the insistent crawl of a cosmetic chemist's worst nightmare and also, probably, yours.

 

You are playing it cool. Mostly because you haven't got a fucking sword.

 

Her other hand has risen to curve around your back without once brushing your side.

 

t0ck

 

"This is incredibly stupid."

 

She doesn't smile. If she could hear you, you are almost certain she would. You both smile a lot more these days, because of the alternatives. She has tucked in her chin.

 

You can feel the air move as she draws her hand back and forth, parallel to but inches above the planes of your shoulders.

 

She's still playing the goddamn violin.

 

t1ck

 

Except:

 

She's never done this before, exactly.

 

By which you mean- in all the hours you've spent dutifully napping while she kept watch, you've never seen her dreamself spasm to the tune of a chalk ogre's untimely demise. You've never seen her sleepknit her way to victory atop the back of an imagined imp, though you've woken, way too many times, to the sight of her cleaning blood off her wool. (It's reached the point where the glisten of soaked fiber is actually a little comforting. Tells you the last remains of the world didn't disappear while you slept.)

 

Now, it looks like the last remains of the world are coming to you.

 

t0ck

 

Something chilly has spread over your shoulderblades.

 

Tentacles- and that's what they are, aren't they, tentacles of insubstantial pitch- fan from her edges, frilling at the corners of her jaw; and all around your lowered head the air is alive with song.

 

"Rose," you say, "I would really fucking appreciate it if you chose now to achieve spiritual enlightenment and open. Your fucking. Eyes."

 

Her sawing takes her hand so far up that you have to lean in close to avoid letting her touch you, or you touch her.

 

You certainly do know how to put the moron in oxymoron, Strider, you think, in Rose's voice.

 

There are stars in the window, or eyes. Her eyes stay frozen in their sockets, under their translucent lids. Mascara marks out the shadows of her lashes.

 

Her hand pulls back, and you can hear it, one note, filthy with the modulation of a thousand squiggled voices, not pure but very sharp.

 

You say her name again.

__

t1ck

You take back what you said about the pitch being insubstantial; the tentacles solidify right along with the sound.

 

You can feel the one around your chest, now, the sudden density of its presence muscular and freaky.

 

"Holy shit," you remark, and unthinkingly reach up to pry at it with your free hand, i.e., the only non-hentai-derived thing that was standing between you and faceplanting in Rose's stomach.

 

You careen forward. The hentai representatives shove you back, stiffening like puppet dick to cage you at arm's length. Which, hey, not that you're not grateful to have been saved the nostrilful of pajamas, but- in the same moment as you were having your honor forcibly defended, Rose began to writhe. Is writhing, now. Her shadow monstrous on the wall.

 

The bed rocks. The room rocks, like a menacing metronome, the slosh of purple decor almost enough to make you vomit up the gushers you had for lunch. The sky outside furthers its pitiless pulsation agenda, to general astonishment.

 

In the whole nightdrenched world the only things, the only things that are still, are the limbs looped round your arm and chest and, as of just now, your throat.

 

You make to dig your fingernails into the viscid membranes of the one that's got you collared. When you put pressure on it, though, you see Rose wince.

 

So that's out, then.

 

"Rose," you say instead, for the third time this evening (and yes, that is a record broken as only a Strider knows how, thanks), "don't do this. You can hear me, can't you? You can totally hear me."

 

You don't struggle. You strain to see a flicker of acknowledgment in her slack face.

 

t0ck

 

TT: Can I hear you?

TT: Hmm.

TT: No.

 

t1ck

 

"Rose?"

 

The fact is, you're not even sure what you're asking of her. The fact is, you don't give a damn.

 

Spasms shake her spare gusherfed frame, and there's no lyricism to the jerking of her elbow, not any longer. It looks more like the action of a chainsaw than a bow.

 

t0ck

 

Then she rolls her hips.

 

The tentacles spool long, unrolling out of her like newspun wool. One long, glossy tendril sprouts from the center of her stomach. Her shirt has ridden up to rest bunched over her diaphragm, which, you know, maybe under other circumstances you'd treasure the view, but right now you're just having flashbacks to every shitty Egbertian movie that used to taste of delicious irony, and which now just tastes of iron, in your head.

 

The same fat tentacle that pulls smokily from her stomach just hooked itself behind your knee.

 

You are being borne upward, actually.

 

"No," you say, "nope, not gonna, fucking shan't."

 

The wet grip on your thigh tightens, cold and familiar. Under other circumstances, you would not blame it for wanting some of that choice rump, but these are not other circumstances. Are you more terrified of her or for her, you wonder, and can't actually tell.

 

Then she groans.

 

Your ass hits the ceiling with a thud. You can feel the panic in your gut.

 

"Let me down," you hiss. Your ears are full of the wet sound of your own breathing. "Goddamnit, Lalonde, let me down-"

 

t1ck

 

"I seriously wasn't going to stop you," you say, quietly, later. You don't know how much later.

 

"Just because I'm not sure talking to Them is a great idea, which, hey, look where even being in the vicinity has apparently gotten you, doesn't mean… fuck, Rose, it's not like I was ever going to get in your way. But I can't just watch you- whatever, whatever this is, you opened your heart and soul and sushi poured in, I don't care, I just can't. So. Let me down."

 

You close your eyes.

 

When you open them again, there's a tiny, frondlike black tail wrapped around the bridge of your glasses. It gives the plastic a tug. Beside the nauseating roil of rest of your marine bondage ensemble, the movement is strangely gentle, rhythmfree and investigatory against your nose.

 

"Oh, hell no." You lift your as-yet-unleashed hand to grip one arm of the shades. And then...

 

You look down at Rose's upturned, sweatsheened face. You think of the bright glimpse of her expression you got, in the moment after the shades of your waking self came flying off and before the Articulate Thornbows made resounding contact with your skull.

 

t0ck

 

The rasp of plastic over your hair, as you ease the glasses out from behind your ears, is very loud.

 

The fucking frond doesn't need much encouragement. It yanks them away.

 

You blink back the wash of light-

 

"Dave," slurs Rose, in a voice like John's blood and Jade's ash. In her sleep.

 

If you could just reach her.

 

t1ck

 

"Please," you say. "Please, just, for once in your life, stop being retarded and trust me."

 

t0ck

 

You wrap both your hands around the tentacle at your waist. You do not squeeze.

 

Her whole body, or what is left of it, tautens like a tuned string.

 

t1ck

 

TT: Well.

TT: When you put it like that.

 

t0ck

 

They let you down. They bring you trembling in until you're suspended with the end of your nose two inches above the sharp tip of hers, and you can smell the seasalt on her breath. You can see-

 

You kiss her.

 

 

t1ck

 

Well, what else is there for you to do? A girl- the girl- your friend, your last, your one and your only- who happens to be Rose fucking Lalonde, bundle of trust issues held together with spit and glue and squid juice- puts enough faith in you to let you get up close and personal in a moment of weird video-game-style personal metamorphosis, of _course_ you have to take advantage of her by making out with her stupid sleeping face. Your (impeccable) decision-making skills don't even come into it.

 

This is traditional, right? This is how you wake people up, when all else fails.

 

meOW……….

 

And, anyway, it's only after your lips are doing the horizontal Charleston with hers that it occurs to you that her eyes were already open by the time you finished your descent.

 

Shit shit shit shit-

 

t0ck

 

Her lips part.

 

The tentacles pull back, slipping sleek and impossible under her skin, like the receding curvature of wasted futures.

 

You fall, obviously. Two inches, yeah, but it knocks the wind out of you, and also, more importantly,

 

your mouth slips off hers. Which is somehow the third worst thing that's ever happened to you in thirteen (almost fourteen) years of bullshit.

 

Which is somehow-

 

She wraps her arms around your waist and buries her face in your shoulder. "Fuck," she says, indistinctly, and you can't really disagree.

 

t1ck

 

It feels like forever until you find a word.

 

But you have the perfect icebreaker, at long last.

 

"So. Tentacles."

 

"Shut up, Strider," she suggests, her dry girl fingers digging into your flank, her dry girl breath blooming into your skin. It is pretty awesome.

 

Someone's id has been spending too much time on Eff Eff Enn, you consider saying. You consider laughing aloud.

 

You breathe.

 

t0ck

 

"Do I even want to know," you ask, eventually.

 

"Yes," she says, "you do," and she lifts her nose from your neck and twists, and this time when her mouth meets yours the moment stretches like the beat of bloody silence after a track ends, the torn and waiting beat before the music starts over again.


End file.
